The global temperature jigsaw

December 17th, 2013 by stefan

Since 1998 the global temperature has risen more slowly than before.Given the many explanations for colder temperatures discussed in the media and scientific literature (La Niña, heat uptake of the oceans, arctic data gap, etc.) one could jokingly ask why no new ice age is here yet.This fails to recognize, however, that the various ingredients are small and not simply additive.Here is a small overview and attempt to explain how the different pieces of the puzzle fit together.

First an important point: the global temperature trend over only 15 years is neither robust nor predictive of longer-term climate trends. I’ve repeated this now for six years in various articles, as this is often misunderstood. The IPCC has again made this clear (Summary for Policy Makers p. 3):

Due to natural variability, trends based on short records are very sensitive to the beginning and end dates and do not in general reflect long-term climate trends.

Likewise for data uncertainty: the trends of HadCRUT and NASA data hardly differ in the long term, but they do over the last 15 years. And the small correction proposed recently by Cowtan & Way to compensate for the data gap in the Arctic almost does not change the HadCRUT4 long-term trend, but it changes that over the last 15 years by a factor of 2.5.

Therefore, it is a (by some deliberately promoted) misunderstanding to draw conclusions from such a short trend about future global warming, let alone climate policy. To illustrate this point, the following graph shows one simulation from the CMIP3 model ensemble:

Figure 2Temperature evolution in a model simulation with the MRI model.Other models also show comparable “hiatuses” due to natural climate variability.This is one of the standard simulations carried out within the framework of CMIP3 for the IPCC 2007 report.Graph: Roger Jones.

In this model calculation, there is a “warming pause” in the last 15 years, but in no way does this imply that further global warming is any less. The long-term warming and the short-term “pause” have nothing to do with each other, since they have very different causes. By the way this example refutes the popular “climate skeptics” claim that climate models cannot explain such a “hiatus” – more on that later.

Now for the causes of the lesser trend of the last 15 years. Climate change can have two types of causes: external forcing or internal variability in the climate system.

External forcing: the sun, volcanoes & co.

The possible external drivers include the shading of the sun by aerosol pollution of the atmosphere by volcanoes (Neely et al., 2013) or Chinese power plants (Kaufmann et al. 2011). Second, a reduction of the greenhouse effect of CFCs because these gases have been largely banned in the Montreal Protocol (Estrada et al., 2013). And third, the transition from solar maximum in the first half to a particularly deep and long solar minimum in the second half of the period – this is evidenced by measurements of solar activity, but can explain only part of the slowdown (about one third according to our correlation analysis).